Steven Pinker: Linguistics as a Window to Understanding the Brain | Big Think

arbitrary as a telephone number from a date in history, you are reminded of the remarkable capacity of human long-term memory to store the meanings and sounds of words.  But of course we don't just throw out individual words, we combine them into phrases and sentences.  And that brings up the second important component of language; that is, grammar.  Now, the modern study of grammar is inseparable from the contributions of one linguist, the famous scholar Noam Chomsky, who set the agenda for the field of

linguistics

for the last 60 years. To begin with, Chomsky pointed out that the main enigma that we have to explain to understand language is creativity or, as linguists usually call it, productivity, the ability to produce and understand new words.

Of language disorders, the teaching of reading, writing and foreign languages, interpreting the language of law, politics and literature. But for someone like me, language is eternally fascinating because it addresses fundamental questions of the human condition.  It is really at the center of a series of different concerns in thought, in social relations, in human biology, in human evolution, that speak to what is special about the human species.  Language is the most distinctive talent of the human being.  Language is a

window

into human nature and, most importantly, the vast expressive power of language is one of the wonders of the natural world.

 Thank you.